


don't you forget (about me)

by MathildaHilda



Category: 12 Monkeys (TV)
Genre: Amnesia, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Post-Canon, Semi-Immortality, cole doesn't have the best happily ever now
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-08
Updated: 2020-02-08
Packaged: 2021-02-28 05:21:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22618531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MathildaHilda/pseuds/MathildaHilda
Summary: once upon a time, he had loved a woman, and she had loved him
Relationships: Hannah "Ziet" Jones & James Cole, James Cole & Athan Cole, James Cole & Jennifer Goines, James Cole & Katarina Jones, James Cole/Cassandra Railly
Comments: 2
Kudos: 8





	don't you forget (about me)

It takes a few years before they notice.

It’s Athan that asks when he comes back from overseas for Christmas. He’s been told his parents’ story, his father’s story, and knows for a fact that time favors his father above the rest.

Time owes him, despite his shortcomings.

So, Athan asks, and Cole chokes on the food.

~

They go looking for Jennifer and get let inside Markridge and squeezed into hugs so tight they leave breathing something to be imagined.

Cole asks her if time has changed the deal; he did as it asked. Jones undid the ending, and time seemed happy with that.

At first, it seems like the question only brings confusion. She’s still Primary; there’s a little bit left, but nothing of what he’s asked has come up in her conversations with time.

Time promised him a happily ever _now_ , she says.

It dawns on her. It doesn’t dawn on them until Cole has stared long and hard at the unicorn outside the window. It blinks at him with its black eyes, as if it knows the secret that he doesn’t.

Not happily ever _after_. Time owes him.

Just not enough to give him an ending.

~

They find Jones, dragging Athan along like the kicking and screaming teenager he is, and ask very politely if they could speak with her.

Athan studies most of what she teaches, but he doesn’t have to like her for that, and Cole understands Cassie’s aversion for bringing him along to Jennifer. He’d have gone through the roof if he’d seen the unicorn.

She doesn’t remember them, at first. It takes a while for her to believe in her creation of time travel, and during the whole visit, Cole tries very hard not to stare at Hannah – leaned against the doorframe of an adjacent office, glasses low on her nose as she eyes the family that has more or less stumbled into her mother’s office.

Elliot remains oversea at a conference or some such, and it almost, _almost_ , feels like before.

‘he doesn’t age,’ Athan snaps, breaking off his father’s jumbled words.

‘nineteen years, and he still looks exactly the same,’

Time doesn’t like it when you meddle with her affairs, Jennifer had said before they left.

Somewhere in the building, a clock ticks.

~

Despite tests done by both Jones and Markridge, it doesn’t make anyone the wiser.

Athan is twenty-two when a breakthrough comes, and by then, Jennifer has painted an entire room yellow and scribbled mathematical inconsistencies into the margins of time, and Jones has a room dedicated to all things James Cole.

It’s almost like they’re back to where they were; but, instead of trying to figure out how to save someone, they’re now working on ways to kill someone.

Well, not _kill_ kill, per se. Just, make a man live a little shorter than time seems intent on letting him do.

Even for his outside perspective of time, existing outside of it, and everything, Cole seems to still have more than his memories from a past timeline to rely on.

By the time Athan is twenty-two, Cole is, in the old timeline, barely twenty-five himself.

Time seems intent, despite everything that’s happened, on letting him live the entirety of his life and then some, as a thirty-something because time just can’t make up its damn mind.

They’re right, for a very long time.

Then, Athan’s daughter starts asking questions.

~

Marion is five years old when she asks her grandfather why he doesn’t have that much gray in his hair when Sally has a grandfather who _only_ has gray hair.

Cassie looks on with a look of grief in her eyes, her own hair streaked with silver, intermixed with the pale gold, and when she turns her eyes away, she can only look to Athan.

Athan, a renowned scientist, and everything, have no answers to give. His own eyes contain some grief, but not just as much. He will not see his father die, but Cole will not even _have_ the luxury if it goes the way they predict it.

Jones has cancer, and Hannah doesn’t know where to begin or end the research into James Cole’s impossibility.

Jennifer painted the world yellow until Cole told her that enough was enough, and that time might’ve done its share.

Marion asks again when she’s ten, and later when she’s fifteen.

‘I don’t know,’ Cole says, and it breaks Cassie’s heart.

She wanted them to have forever, even if the forest was red, and now, time has made them incompatible.

She wanted forever, Cole wanted now.

Time seems intent on granting them their wishes.

~

Cole refuses. Athan insists.

‘for her sake,’ he says, and _fine_ , get on with it then.

He’s lost track of his own age. He looks exactly the same as he did, thirty-seven years ago, but Cassie doesn’t, so he steals her age as his own and wishes they’d look compatible.

They don’t. But, they should.

They should’ve moved into the care home together, but it’s against the rules of the home that children stay with their parents.

Because that is what he is now; his wife’s son.

Just because time played according to their wishes.

~

Hannah calls him on a Friday and tells him that something’s come up and that it could be urgent.

She doesn’t say that it _is_ urgent, just that it could be, and that’s good enough for him.

He kisses Cassie goodbye, just for now, and she smiles just as sweetly up at him, the same as she has done for the last forty years.

Now, he can’t even celebrate that openly.

He loves a woman, and she loves him back. That should be enough.

He steps out of an airport on a Sunday, takes a shot on a Monday, and flies back the same day.

Hopefully, it works. Hopefully.

Doctor Cassandra Railly-Cole dies in her sleep, on a Thursday, aged seventy-five.

( _she is survived by her husband and son, is the truth few people know_

_the obituary says; she is survived by her two sons_

_cole burns the obituary in a fireplace at the emerson_ )

~

At the time of the funeral, Cole stays until everyone else has left.

A wreath covers the upturned soil, snow sails down from above.

He’d told her he was sorry, the day before she died.

What for, he wasn’t entirely sure himself.

‘there are no serpents and demons, anymore,’ she’d said, breaths heavy in her throat. ‘there is only now,’

She breaks his heart. He wishes he could’ve gone with her.

A part of him yells at him; _see this through_.

For her. For Athan. For Jones and Hannah and Jennifer. Hell, even Deacon.

See what lies at the end.

~

James Cole goes missing on a Monday.

~

He sits by another bedside and looks just the same.

For once, he’s grateful, because the whole affair is almost made easier by it.

Athan asks about Cassie. About time and now. About home.

He tells him that Cassie’s waiting at home. That she’s trying her hand at her mother’s famous casserole.

Athan laughs. Marion kisses her father’s forehead and tells him she’ll be back tomorrow.

‘I’ll stay,’ Cole says, and Marion nods and smiles. It’s been another forty years. She has her own children now.

Children that don’t know that the man sitting by the grandfather’s side is a living ghost.

Forty years, it seems, is no time at all.

~

‘When are you gonna give me up?!’ he shouts at the universe and throws a rock at the ice. It skids across the surface. The ice is like a mirror, and the sun bounces its rays off the surface.

He would’ve called it beautiful, had he been able to have this moment another way.

There’s a bellowing sound as the ice responds to the pressure, but the universe remains painfully silent.

He throws another rock, a little harder. A little angrier.

The cracks spindle their way toward the bank of the lake.

~

He’d had one last conversation with Hannah over the phone, and talked about side effects.

Other than not dying, but he doesn’t say that. Had he been dead, or even aged, they wouldn’t have this conversation.

There were none that he could think of, other than his loved ones dying before he did. He wasn’t angry at her; she was trying her best.

But, not even a person’s best was sometimes the wished-for ending.

Jones had done her best, and he was grateful for it. But, he was getting pretty tired of living like this.

~

Immortality, or even living for a really long time, is not something he recommends.

He’s a straggler for most of what follows; life is simple – keep walking, and eventually, you’ll have a purpose.

So, he does.

He walks on forest paths, picks up odd jobs, and meets even odder people, and wander the wide-open highways.

He does this for most of what follows up until the moment he forgets.

He doesn’t recommend immortality.

He’s not entirely sure how long he’s walked the roads. He doesn’t remember when he began, and, thus, can’t tell you how long he’s been doing it for.

But, this, he remembers; he loved a woman, and she loved him back.

Not even the memory of time can take that away.

~

He wanders the streets and finds a house.

He stares at the house for the longest time, trying to place it where it belongs, but finds, to a sudden panic, that he can’t.

A white house, alone at the end of a street, with no neighbors as far as the eye can see. He knows they’re there, he passed them when he walked by, but they’re far enough away to make you think that you are alone in the world, by merely sitting on the porch step and hearing only birdsong.

( _if time made an example out of him, he doesn’t remember the argument that made this whole thing necessary, or even why it was him_

_he knows that he knew, at some point_

_human minds just aren’t meant to stick around for so long_ )

A little girl comes bouncing around the house, her hair a rusty blonde and eyes darker than the summer sky, and stops at the sight of him.

There’s a dog by her side, small and spotted, and it growls at him, but the girl seems unafraid.

Don’t talk to strangers, sounds like something a mother would say. Either the girl has never heard it, or simply ignores it. She bounces his way, the dog trapped in a leash.

‘hello,’ she says and stares at him with wide eyes. She can’t be older than eight. If even that.

‘this is Molly,’ she says and points to the dog, who’s now sniffing his boots with fervor.

‘and, I’m Cassie,’ she says, and the worlds grind to a halt.

( _once upon a time, he had loved a woman, and she had loved him_ )

He gives her his name, a new one he chose only a few years ago. The next thing he says comes unbidden to his tongue, and he almost spits out the words.

The words taste bitter and burn like acid.

Little Cassie frowns.

He tells her he used to live there, and the smile comes back. Molly has planted herself by the girl’s feet.

She says something he doesn’t hear and disappears around the bend of the house.

He’s moved on by the time she comes back, dragging her father by the hand to meet the stranger who once lived in the house of cedar and pine.

~

He stumbles over flower petals in pale white snow, and you’d think he’d remember such an earlier reaction.

He doesn’t, and his breaths come fast and raw from his throat, and out between his parted lips.

He thinks there should be blood on the petals, but there’s not. There’s only a dying bouquet on a woman’s grave in cold midwinter.

White, pink, and orange. The snow is cold.

He knows – _remembers_ – that he loved the woman that rests beneath the stone.

That should be enough, and it almost is.

Don’t ask him about time. He’s quarreled and lost enough because of it.

( _there’s gray in his beard, and it isn’t snow_ )

~

This is what he remembers,

Cassie smelled like vanilla and rose and gunpowder.

Athan hated broccoli but loved cauliflower and slept with a nightlight until he was fourteen.

Ramse found him first, in both timelines, not the other way around.

Jones smoked through an entire pack of cigarettes in a day, way back when, when she made her own and time travel was a possibility.

Hannah loved his father, and Matthew loved her.

( _it took too long to remember their names_

 _he should never have forgotten them in the first place_ )

_After_ , looks a whole lot like the Keys.

~

There’s an old man on a park bench, watching the cars drive by in a living world.

You don’t see it, but you know that he has long since passed with the memory of time.

The city is loud, and an old man is dead.

But that’s alright. He knows what comes after.


End file.
